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Creating a custom 404 page for your GitHub Pages site

You can display a custom 404 error page when people try to access nonexistent pages on your site.

GitHub Pages is available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "GitHub’s products."

  1. On GitHub, navigate to your site's repository.

  2. Navigate to the publishing source for your site. For more information, see "Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site."

  3. Above the list of files, using the Add file drop-down, click Create new file. "Create new file" in the "Add file" dropdown

  4. In the file name field, type 404.html or 404.md.

  5. If you named your file 404.md, add the following YAML front matter to the beginning of the file:

    ---
permalink: /404.html
---

  6. Below the YAML front matter, if present, add the content you want to display on your 404 page.

  7. At the bottom of the page, type a short, meaningful commit message that describes the change you made to the file. You can attribute the commit to more than one author in the commit message. For more information, see "Creating a commit with multiple authors." Commit message for your change

  8. If you have more than one email address associated with your account on GitHub.com, click the email address drop-down menu and select the email address to use as the Git author email address. Only verified email addresses appear in this drop-down menu. If you enabled email address privacy, then <username>@users.noreply.github.com is the default commit author email address. For more information, see "Setting your commit email address." Choose commit email addresses

  9. Below the commit message fields, decide whether to add your commit to the current branch or to a new branch. If your current branch is the default branch, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request. For more information, see "Creating a pull request." Commit branch options

  10. Click Propose new file. Propose new file button

Further reading